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Category Archives: Maximilian Vater

I´m living in Retrodorm, a student accommodation which is near the CityMarket in Kupittaa. It is a student accommodation especially for the exchange students. In the whole building are living around 90 students from different countries. Armenia, Slovakia, Russia, Czech Republic or Japan; it feels like that from every country of the world someone is living here. On the floor where I live are 17 rooms. We have a shared kitchen, shared shower room and a nice community room.

It´s a nice place for celebrating pre-parties before going in the clubs in Turku. Often you have different opportunities in the building on the same evening. When you want relax, there´s usually a movie night on one floor. Sitting together in one of the community rooms and watching a movie on the big flat screen. On another floor you can play to the same time beer-pong and get prepared for going out in the night. You can decide on your own how you want to spend the evening.

Compared to friends who are living in the Student village I prefer Retrodorm more, because it´s also very familiar. It´s quite easy to find lots of new friends and every floor is like a small own family. When you have some problems or you just want to talk you will always find someone in the kitchen or the community room. The building is next to a small forest so that when you look out from the windows you can often see woodpecker and squirrel in the trees. For people who need a lot of time for his/her self and doesn’t want to have people the most time around them, they should look to other housing possibilities.

After my arrival on the port of Turku my tutors picked me up and brought me to my student accommodation. Everything was organized for me; they had the key for my room, my starting package and a lot of tips for me. I was a little bit surprised that everything was so uncomplicated and well organized.

On the next morning me and a girl from my floor decided to go jogging. After 10 km jogging we were standing on a crossroads and we had a small disagreement. She was sure that for the way home we have to turn left. I was sure we have to turn right. I won and we turned right, but we got completely lost. Afterwards we were sure that turning left would have been incorrect too. When we realized that we have no idea how to get home we asked in a car center. The car salesman was very friendly and took us in his office. He printed a way description from google. Maps for us and explained it detailed. After 5 km jogging we reached our dormitory and were really happy.

We were positive surprised that it´s so easy to get help when you have a small problem. I´m not sure if it´s for foreign-language speakers in Germany (my home country) as easy as here to get help so simple. The English language is a lot of more present here compared to Germany. In Finland when you switch on the television, every second channel is in English. In Germany the whole TV program is in German. After staying three month in Turku my experience is that especially older people are speaking better English than in Germany. People over 50 years old often didn´t learn English at school or learned it bad and are scared of speaking it. So when you ever travel to Germany and you need help, first try it to speak to younger people.